Samsung Pay now gets Mobikwik

The Mobikwik wallet has joined Samsung Pay’s list of partners, making it one of the payment solutions available on the Samsung Pay app, reports PTI, adding that Mobikwik has over 55 million users and 1.4 million merchants. Samsung Pay’s website lists Paytm as its “current wallet partner” for the primary Samsung Pay app, while Mobikwik is listed as a partner, along with Paytm, for the Samsung Pay Mini app. Mobikwik says it will be available on Samsung Pay soon.

The Samsung Mini app integrates these two wallets and UPI, but doesn’t support card or NFC based payments.

For Mobikwik and Paytm, users have to scan a QR code to make a payment. That’s how it has to be done even if you have a Mobikwik or a Paytm app on your phone anyway, but what works for Samsung Pay is that it comes pre-installed on Samsung devices, has built an acceptance network, and offers customers multiple payment options: it’s a payments aggregator, and given that the payments business operates on large scale and thin margins, payments businesses would rather be on it than not. Think of Samsung Pay as a payment gateway for Samsung devices.

Samsung Pay Mini is available on the J7 Max, J7’16, J7 Prime, On Max and On Nxt, although Samsung’s website only mentions J7 Max and On Max. Samsung Pay, in comparison, is available for the following: the S8, S8+, S7, S7 edge, S6 edge+, Note 5, A7 (2017), A5 (2017, A9 Pro, A5 (2016), A7 (2016) and the J7 Pro. Banking partners for Samsung Pay include Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Standard Chartered, Citibank, American Express and SBI Cards. In terms of card acceptance partners, Samsung Pay has a tie up with Pine Labs, and it’s odd that the site doesn’t list Mswipe, which it partnered with in May. Samsung has made it explicitly clear that the payment option will not support online purchases and will work only for in-store purchases.

Security

The website for Samsung Pay says that it has three layers for security:

– Fingerprint or PIN authentication.
– Card tokenization, the process of substituting a sensitive data element with a non-sensitive equivalent. In this case, a card’s number will be masked with an another card number.
– Samsung KNOX, a mobile security solution where card information is still safely encrypted within a separate and secure data vault. This will help when a mobile phone is stolen or compromised.